NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3320051" data-attributes="member: 4937">Barely.  I've never played, which may disqualify my opinion.  But I remember skimming through the rules years ago and being very unimpressed.  I was intrigued at first glance by how comprehensive the character creation rules were, but the more I looked the more I saw a game that was designed as a one off or short campaign or otherwise change of pace and which depended basically entirely on social conventions to be playable.  It looked like a min/max'ers paradise, and the combat rules pretty much depended on villains always pulling thier punches and not trying to kill anyone.  Plus, the D20 system starts breaking down as numbers get close to 20, and starting characters with highly inefficient builds (the sample characters) could get dangerously close to 20 right off the bat.The more you talk about the system, the less I like it.For one thing, it sounds like damage is resisted by a straight up saving throw.  I didn't remember that.  That's awful.  Anyone that has DMed or played high level D20 knows all about the swinginess of saving throws.  Going down at random just cause you threw a '1' is not fun for either PC's or GMs.That's a really bizarre decision for a game which is trying to model superheroics.  About 44 blows, not counting the effects of criticals.Only somewhat.  It's cumbersome only because it involves no passive rolls.  Normally systems try to cut down on the number of rolls by minimizing the number of contested rolls.  For example, D&D doesn't contest the attack roll and instead fixes the result of the defense roll at 10.  This means a simplified combat resolution (appropriate to a hp based game), at the expense of making 'to hit' effects somewhat more predictable.   If you actually had to roll that defense roll, you'd be vulnerable more often to low powered attacks and vulnerable less often to high powered attacks (stuff in the middle would be largely a wash).   Likewise, we could do away with the division by fixing the increments ('for every 3 you beat the roll by' sorta rules).  All of these produce tradeoffs.As I said, it depends on how you implement it.  Many damage saves are implemented with dice pools (West End Star Wars comes to mind).  Dice pools produce more tightly clustered results and fewer extremes than the linear saves in D20.  This makes for less randomness and reduces the importance of hero points outside truly heroic acts.  But even with a linear system, imagine how different MM would play if the base DC of a toughness save for heroes was 10 or even 5.  Getting wounded by anything but very powerful attack would be rare indeed.On the other hand, I wonder how much you'd enjoy MM if every attack was lethal damage.  I might have thought so to once.  When I was younger I use to be annoyed by the lack of realism in combat systems.  After DMing for 20 years and playing a dozen or so systems, I'm much less inclined to feel that realistic combat is a valuable attribute of a gaming system in and of itself.I don't see how.  If I had to go either way, I'm inclined to think it would be better without saving throws at all.You are speaking to someone who used to referee GURPS.  Actually, beyond GURPS.  Have you ever heard of GULLIVER?  I have no problem with the notion that an alert and experienced fighter is not severely wounded with a knife easily, but even to the extent that I find D&D unrealistic it doesn't bother me.  Why is it such a great thing for a DM that the PC's might be dropped unpredictably by any given combat?  It's like having Bodaks on the random encounter table all the time.  Anyway, in the particular example of the knife, even ordinary people are not killed easily by knives unless a sensitive target is hit.  It's not usually the knife wound that kills you, but the blood loss (in fact, its almost always the blood loss, and in serious cases the blood comes out quickly.)</blockquote>

Verification